We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Just as Gorbachev’s failed reforms accelerated processes which “encouraged many Russians to redefine the Soviet territory as alien and to identify the Russian territory as their homeland,” we see a similar process on the rapidly evolving British Right in distinguishing between the Britain of recent memory and its UK replacement. When even Tory grandees such as Lord Frost borrow the disparaging term “Yookay” from the internet Right to disparage what he defines as Blair’s “new country, an actual successor state to the old Great Britain [but] distinct from it”, we see a similar, explicit distinction being made as that between Russia and the USSR. The counterpoint to Blair’s UK, or YooKay — the two are, now, more or less interchangeable — is, as Frost observes, simply Britain.
Whether you welcome this development or fear it, British politics in its current tumultuous form, with all its increasingly radicalised and existential debates on immigration and demographics, on its history, social housing and the welfare state, and on the nature and boundaries of Britishness or Englishness, is inexplicable without accepting that the country has now entered this phase of political development.
To achieve a similar transition today would require us to introduce ways to help people acquire property. Most UK people are much richer than the statistics tell us. That is because they typically do not include the right to free healthcare, to free education for their children, and to the right to receive a state pension upon retirement. These are wealth, but they are not property, in that they cannot be alienated, given away or bequeathed to heirs. They die with the person.
The pathway to a property-owning democracy lies along two parallel routes: access to home ownership and to an investment portfolio. Both of these are property that belongs to the owner, and can be passed on to heirs and successors.
Home ownership can be made more accessible by a massive increase in the supply of housing. This means we have to streamline and liberalize planning laws, particularly in high-demand areas like London and the South East. We must simplify the process for obtaining planning permission and reduce local opposition barriers. The Town and Country Planning Act has passed its sell-by date.
Alfred Marshall’s grand vision of economics was that you did the maths to check your logic. Then you translated all of that into English and burnt the maths. Steve Keen won’t do it that way for of course Marshall was a neoclassical and that’s just wrong, see?
Keen did once try to insist that I followed along with one of his papers – he was showing that there are no free markets, there are only oligopolies and therefore everything must be controlled by politics – and was most put out when I said well, yes, that’s mathematically true but useless.
For his contention was that as we’ve never got an infinite number of producers (nor consumers) therefore that model of free markets – which relies upon no individual producer or consumer having pricing power, which in itself implies an infinite number – therefore neoclassical economics was all wet. His maths was fine for that’s all true too. Except for the bit where if we analyse markets which we know are oligopolistic and then see how many producers we need for them not to be then the number seems to be about 5 or 6. True, true, 7 supermarkets doesn’t mean a wholly perfectly free market with profits no higher than the cost of capital but it’s pretty damn close. Close enough for either jazz or the economics of public policy.
The maths is for working through the logic not a replacement for it.
Farage wants healthcare more like France, Netherlands or Switzerland, which all have a varying degree of insurance element. NHS was always a terrible way to do healthcare, which is why rest of Europe didn’t copy it
So, is it not ironic Reform party are open to at least exploring that kind of system, whereas the supposedly pro-European anti-Brexiteer elements who most depreciate Farage get the vapours at the notion of a more European healthcare system for the UK? 🤣
“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers. Perhaps it is because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to. So, it’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness.”
-Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence
Who are these “political elite warmongers” that are “carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers”? You know how it is. Rich people just love wiping out civilization. It is what rich people live for. And that is why we need socialism, so we can eat the rich and be done with them!
But seriously, Tulsi Gabbard is a demagogue ready to blame nuclear war on some imaginary bunch of rich people, appealing to envy and resentment. Meanwhile, our domestic socialists are ready to burn the country down because they had their heads filled with Marxist sewage in school. What idiot believes that elite Americans are threatening the world with nuclear war? But then, Tulsi Gabbard is part of the political elite, and she most certainly has a bomb shelter. Or did I miss something?
But wait! Tulsi Gabbard is also America’s Director of National Intelligence. Does her rhetoric belong to America and NATO, or does it belong to the socialist camp? What on earth just came out of her mouth?
P.S. Before sharing this article with your friends and family, please be aware that the Government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has recently declared that concern about mass immigration is “terrorist ideology”. A Prevent training course hosted on the Government’s website lists “cultural nationalism” as something that could cause you to be referred for deradicalisation.
Prevent, you’ll remember, is the programme to which the Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana was repeatedly referred from as young as 13. He went on to stab a number of children and adults, 3 of whom died.
Usman Khan, the terrorist who committed the London Bridge attack in 2019, was under Prevent monitoring when he carried out his attack in the middle of a prisoner rehabilitation event for which he had travelled to London. Prevent officers tasked with monitoring him had “no specific training” in dealing with terrorists.
According to the Prevent training guidance, if you believe that “Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” you will be referred to the very programme which failed to deal with them.
Encouragingly, in 2025, wearing a mask in shops, leisure facilities, workplaces or on public transport is for the most part confined to a tiny minority. Alas, the exception to this return of sanity is the health and social care sector, where a few pro-mask ideologues residing in the infection control departments recurringly succeed in muzzling their staff, patients and visitors. While these pockets of fanaticism exist, there is always a danger that – fuelled by the contagion of safetyism – the imposition of mask requirements can re-ignite across all community settings. With this in mind, on this five-year anniversary of the first UK mask mandates, the campaign group Smile Free is about to release a short film, Masking Humanity, in which health and social care experts vividly convey the enormous harms of masks in these settings. Please help to spread the word to assist in the mission to keep blanket masking out of health and social care.
And Hermer’s characterisation of historical events is in any case cobblers, of course. International law did not stop the actual honest-to-goodness Nazis first time around; American industry and Soviet manpower did that. The idea that if only we had had the ECHR in 1933 all of the unpleasantness of World War Two and the Holocaust could have been avoided is, to put it politely, absurd. One doesn’t constrain a belligerent regime through an ‘international rules-based system’; one does it through force, or the threat of it.
In Ms Harvey’s universe – occupied by the likes of Corrêa do Lago, Greenpeace and the UK’s very own ‘Mad Ed’, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the science is settled, the energy transition is an imperative and decarbonisation will not only save the planet from an impending environmental catastrophe but also bring about economic growth and prosperity. Harvey’s article hinges on the tired assertion that the science of climate change is settled, with a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that human activity drives catastrophic global warming. This figure, derived from John Cook’s 2013 study, has been debunked repeatedly for its methodological flaws — most notably by scholars like David Legates, who found that only a tiny fraction of the studied papers explicitly endorsed the catastrophic narrative.
Triggered by the political shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, the EU Commission launched a campaign to reassert control over Europe’s political narrative. Central to this is the rhetoric of ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, framed as threats to democratic stability. The Commission presents these programmes as public-interest research initiatives, but they constitute a form of soft authoritarianism, enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), which should be relabelled as the ‘Digital Surveillance Act’, is the crown jewel of this strategy. The legal framework enables the EU to regulate online speech under the guise of protection.
The MCC Brussels report underlines a disturbing fact: the Commission spends 31 per cent more on narrative control than on research addressing cancer, despite cancer causing nearly two million deaths annually in Europe. This prioritisation signals that Brussels fears the cancer of free speech more than the disease. Public funds are being funnelled unaccountably into a disinformation narrative designed to shape, limit and manage the terms of public debate.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
